ough Sylvie Sylvie no please timeloop is the thing I'm sensitive aboutttttt
(pls continue I love angst and pain and torturing myself and others 😈😈)
~ wee-fuckin-woo :]
(post for everyone else's reference)
everyone say thank you @corporatebanana and especially @wee-fuckin-woo for enabling me to yell about this for the past ~hour. after all that, here is a slightly cleaned up version of the Evilest Fucking Thought. warning that this is genuinely probably the meanest idea i've ever had in like 10+ years of fandom.
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Walk with me here: Tommy stuck in a time loop of the lab, where buck is the one who keeps dying. over and over and over and over and over again. no matter what he does to try to save him. the only way to break the time loop is to save buck. i haven't decided if it's worse if tommy has the choice to exit the loop and refuses to unless he can save buck, OR if he literally cannot exit it unless buck also lives. many delicious awful possibilities either way.
how many times does tommy watch die? how many times does he watch buck bleed out, the light leaving his eyes, the breath going still in his chest? how many times does he listen to the 118 scream for buck? how many loops does it take, slowly breaking down and sliding one step deeper into despair, before he realizes that he can't save evan without letting someone else die instead? how many loops before he chooses, very literally, to let bobby die so evan can live?
the only way to break the time loop is to save evan. the only way to save evan is to let bobby die instead.
i doubt bobby's the first person he chooses, either. once he reaches the conclusion that the only answer is to pick someone else to die in evan's place--can you imagine the calculus of that decision? the first thing he tries is to die in evan's place himself, but that obviously doesn't work even after a dozen tries. so then, who's next? does he choose ravi, who is the newest and the youngest, and evan's first probie? or is it hen, who showed him a different way to live, who helped him realize that it's possible to live without being afraid of his own desires all the time? is it chim, who literally saved his life, who is evan's brother in law, who has a newborn waiting for him at home? is it bobby, who gave tommy the chance to live again by sending him off to harbour, who evan loves as a father he never had?
the way he'd lose a bit of himself, of his humanity, of his sanity, with each agonizing decision. the absolute despair when each choice turns out to be wrong, to fail, and evan dies anyway or he wakes up on the same morning all over again. going through that process, over and over and over again, until he runs out of other options and gets to bobby.
and bobby dies. and evan lives.
the only way to break the time loop was to save evan. the only way to save evan was to let bobby die instead.
what is left of tommy in the aftermath of it all? how does he ever look anyone in the eye ever again, knowing--literally, viscerally, from experience--that he'd choose to let them die if it meant evan would live? how does he ever look evan in the eyes again, knowing what he was willing to do--what he did do--what he chose to cost evan? knowing that he's the reason evan is grieving the greatest loss of his life, but also that he's the reason evan is alive to grieve at all?
and, whenver he eventually somehow finds out, how does buck live with it? the knowledge that tommy was willing to sacrifice literally every other person in his family to save him? that he did choose to let bobby die? that buck is, very literally, alive in bobby's place?
and then. to make a dark idea even darker. tommy decides he can't live with it all, and to burn his life to the ground and fuck off somewhere in the woods to live in exile and wallow in guilt forever. except then evan asks tommy to stay, and what can he do? for everything he did, he owes it to evan to do whatever the fuck evan asks for the rest of eternity. so he goes back. he learns to act like a normal fucking person. he helps evan grieve and recover.
evan, who knows nothing. who slowly slowly rebuilds his life, with tommy right there by his side. maybe they make it to six months again, and buck starts to almost feel like he might make it through. like he might not be completely swallowed up by the black hole of bobby's death. like maybe, just maybe, he might even be happy again one day.
they make it long enough that tommy almost, almost, almost, almost convinces himself to forget what happened, what he did, and be grateful that evan is alive. that he can do is penance and make it up to the world, to evan, by spending the rest of his life doing everything he possibly can to make evan happy.
and then, and only then, evan finds out about the time loop and what tommy did to get them out of it.
i'll be honest, i have no idea how either of them ever recover from that, like, at all. and this is WAY darker and angstier than i would probably ever actually write, especially when there's not even an ambiguous/vaguely hopeful open ending i can think of to give it. but just. the torment nexus of it all!!!
